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Before you get into the busy holiday season, you should check on the following:
1. Do know when your domain name expires?
If your domain name is set to expire in the next month or so, now is a good time to renew it. Even if it is set to auto-renew, it`s best to do this early. Why? Often it`s been a year or so since you last renewed it, and the payment method (such as a credit card) is no longer active or on file.
It`s very easy to check when your domain name expires. Simply go here>>
And from a search engine optimization standpoint, the longer you renew your domain name into the future (i.e. 5 years), the more you will gain “trust” from search engines like Google. Why? It`s a small signal, but registering your domain name into the future indicates to Google that you think your business or organization will be around for more than two more months (and paying a small fee for the domain name registration
2. Do you know when your SSL certificate expires?
It`s never a good sign when a customer is on an eCommerce site, goes to checkout, and receives the dreaded “This site is NOT secure” warning.
Kiss of death from a shopping experience. The customer is most likely to go away and buy from another similar site.
The top reason this happens is that the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate has expired. SSL certificates are usually granted for one or two years, and then need to be renewed.
SSL is a type of encryption that uses public key / private key codes to scramble all of the information you type into a website before your credit card information, password, and other information are transmitted across the Web.
Often the process of renewing an SSL certificate means that you need to generate a new SSL key, and verify ownership of the domain with the certificate authority.
The process can take 5 minutes, but if for some reason the email address listed under the domain name registration isn`t valid (or someone else controls that email address), the process can take days to resolve.
How do you test this? Depending on the type of browser you are using, visit a secure page on the site. You can usually click on the lock icon in the browser to bring up a report; you may have to drill down into the report to see the Issued Date and Expires On date for the certificate.
Another common SSL error: Even if your SSL certificate hasn`t expired, customers on a secure site may receive a warning if some of the images, javascript or CSS on the page are referenced using non-secure links.
For example, if you had a page that is displaying a special upsell offer on the cart page (and the cart page is secure), make sure that the image source reference link uses the https (img src=”https”) instead of the http location.
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